Band Interview: Era 9

Games, Brrraaains & A Head-Banging Life is proud to bring you an interview with the Canadian rock band Era 9!

1. How did you get started as a band?

The band has been together for 6 years, but members have changed, and we found our sound in 2016. Jona, Marco and Joe met in high school, all sharing the same passion for music, and that progressed to the start of a band, and lead us to where we are today. Lalla was in a “rival” band from our city, so we all knew of each other in the MTL music scene. Joe and Jona had actually seen Laurie perform with her old band years before she joined Era 9, through mutual friends. We all had a passion for music since we were kids, and that brought us all together.

2. How would you describe your sound?

Our roots come from Rock music and that’s how we started. Over the years, we’ve grown with experience, playing shows, listening to different genres, etc. Coming from Montreal, we’ve learned to appreciate all styles of music. We live in a city that is very multi-cultural and has a very diverse music scene. Our city is really big on Hip-Hop and EDM and we wanted to break down all stylistic boundaries and merge all the styles of music we love, creating what we call “TrapRock”.

3. What bands/artists would you say have influenced your style of music?

It’s more of genres of music that inspire us most, rather than just bands or artists. The core of our music will be hard rock, with heavy riffs, but we enjoy changing up the basic usual structure of songs to an EDM/Trap type of structure. But to name a few, we can say we’re inspired by Skrillex, Diplo, 21 Pilots, Linkin Park, Drake, Volumes and Tesseract.

4. Has the rise of YouTube & music streaming helped or hindered you as a band?

We’ll start by talking about the internet in general. It has its pros and cons. It definitely becomes more positive with time as a band grows in popularity, because once you have that audience reach, your music will be shared around the world instantly, unlike back in the day where it took time for places around the world to hear bands or artists. All they had was radio and word of mouth. But it can also be negative for bands starting out in terms of making money, due to downloading of music nowadays.

You just have to keep working harder than the competition out there, by taking advantage of all these networking platforms that exist. Create and release as much content as possible, and make it easily accessible on all these platforms. Because labels no longer want to build artists and bands,the more people you can get on your own to hear your music, the more it will be shared, and that’s when success will come!

5. What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making music?

We all love to work out and cook!

6. What are your future plans musically? Tours?

We’ve been writing/recording new material and gearing up to take over the world in 2017. We’ll be releasing a full length album, called “Gravity”, this coming Spring, and heading out on tour to promote it. Make sure to follow us on all social networks @era9official and join 9gAng now at www.era9.com to receive updates on upcoming tours, and release dates of new music.

We’d like to thank Era 9 for taking part in this interview & Stencil PR for arranging it. You can find out more about the band over on their website here. Check them out over on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & SoundCloud also.

Track Of The Week: Black Dracula - EYE/Animation Version from Black Dracula EP by Upcdownc

You can pick up the Black Dracula EP for free on Bandcamp where you can also pick up their latest album 'I, Awake' as well as previous work. You can find out much more about the band on Facebook, Twitter, their website & YouTube.